Shall we do the February month of my birth J.J. Krupert countdown of songs from my stupid little tiny and obsolete ipod which makes me so happy because it is a survival of the fittest playlist machine and I will be sad when I accidentally finally step on it? Sure, why not...
#1: "Time Of The Preacher" by Willie Nelson - When I was a young one and my dad would wake up magically without a hangover at like 7 in the morning on Sunday and start pumping LPs throughout the house, I'd be like, "Man, when I grow up, I'm gonna hate stupid country music." Yet here I am, a full grown man with full blown problems finding solace in Willie's soothing ass voice. Holmes is a national treasure, far more so than a lot of the bullshit people put on TV and act like I should care about.
#2: "Just Us Kids" by James McMurtry - McMurtry is a thing that's not exactly anything I'd brag about loving on, yet I don't hate on a handful of his songs at all, so they survive within the danger zone of my J.J. Krupert limit. To make it analagous to real life survival evolution, this song wouldn't be the fastest cheetah or the strongest lion, but it wouldn't be the gimp, so it would hobble along for a long time and live a full life, without note, but without tragedy, and that would be it. This is a true working class song, not just in content, but in the fact it meanders along the back roads of my stupid gaypod, never really making itself noticed (meaning I've never played it twice in a row if it comes on, like I obsessively compulsively do for some shit, like a pre-teen girl listening to Taylor Swift), but it doesn't call attention to itself to get deleted either. I'll probably delete it now though since I had to write about it.
#3: "Come A Long Way" by Michelle Shocked - You could almost say the exact same thing for this Michelle Shocked song. I really used to like Michelle Shocked, but I don't know, I think she hit the expiration date inside my soul.
#4: "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" by Ol' Dirty Bastard - Man, my middle kid who gave my J.J. Krupert gaypod it's name, she knew the beginning to "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" at age 3, walking around with her little toddler tumble speak, going "gimme the mic so I can bust it up" and all. You know, I always loved "Brooklyn Zoo" off the ODB album as the best fucking thing ever, and it still is. But the fact of the matter is I'm a dude with three kids and a wife and pigs and chickens and dogs and cats and a job and bills and regular ass things going on and I just can't justify bumping "Brooklyn Zoo" for the rest of my immediate world to hear when I'm home. I'm not trying to raise wild ass kids; I want good ass things for them, not the chaos that they're gonna have to genetically fight already. But "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" is pretty kid-friendly for the most part, so far as I care to pay attention. Sure, the backwards shit is probably subliminal messages on how to smoke crack through a cardboard tube with some Juicy Fruit wrappers as a filter, but fuck it. What I don't know only makes me blinder, and arbeit macht frei bro, arbeit macht frei.
#5: "Short Circuit" by Daft Punk - I will not even front. The first time I had a Daft Punk song on these lists it was because my daughter made me do it even though I hate Daft Punk. And for the most part I still do. But we were listening to this song on her ipod one night on the 45 minute drive home from ballet class, and I dug the fuck out of it, making her play it over and over the whole ride home. There's something so goofy and roller skating rink electronic about it. I imagine 1984 gangbangers listening to this song and freestyling like Damon Wayans in the beginning of Colors while they ride around in somebody's uncle's car. It actually made me listen to more Daft Punk, and I can safely say that I hate everything they do except for this song so far in my aural experiences. I guess this is kind of their "Hall of Mirrors" by Kraftwerk, which is the only song by them I actually enjoy. I'm a hard white man to please.
#6: "Us" by Brother Ali - I didn't think anything would contend with "Uncle Sam Goddamn" as my go-to Brother Ali song, and honestly his last CD was overwhelmingly underwhelming, being I momentarily put this dude on a pedestal as the possible savior of hip hop that I always do with guys who make a couple fucking ridiculously great tracks amidst the sea of endless derivative bullshit that hip hop has become. Yet I play the fuck out of this song, and love it immensely, and whereas "Uncle Sam Goddamn" can get on your nerves if it's a beautiful day and you just want to drink some beers and feel good to your heart, not get all pissed off about how fucked the world is, this song straight up feels good as shit.
#7: "High Cost Of Living" by Jamey Johnson - Radio country has become so terminally sterilized that when even a halfway raw song like this one comes out, it turns heads. Relative to today's standards, Jamey Johnson seems like some outlaw shit, and I can enjoy it in minor amounts, this song more than most on his CDs. But if you were to stack it up against actual outlaw musics, this still sounds sterilized and pre-fab, which is more a condemnation of the Nashville system for making music where a guy can be a chronic fuck-up with some real life shit to lay down, but they wash it and tinker with it and put a new hat on it and laminate it with a glossy sheen and if we as people who want to listen to music are lucky, there's still a little touch of realness and raw feeling to it. That would be "High Cost of Loving" by Jamey Johnson. Were I to ever win nine lotteries in a row and be worth billions, I would start an anti-Nashville country music town, probably somewhere in north Georgia or western North Carolina, and hopefully guys like Jamey Johnson or Chris Knight could put their life-is-shitty stories to some grimy ass music and not have it all polished up like an episode of American Idol. Country music is no longer "country" music so much as cul-de-sac music. Who am I kidding? Music is just fucked all the way around, because everybody is still thinking about money, and there's nobody actually spending money on music like they used to, so basically the music industry is a bunch of naive people happily investing their soul into lottery tickets where there is no lottery purse anymore, when they could just be like, "Fuck this" from the beginning and get down to doing what they want to do to make their immediate friends and the drunks in the bar they play every Wednesday night the happiest.
#8: "Nature Of The Threat" by Ras Kass - There should be more historical rap like this song, to teach our children all the things opposite to the things they are taught in public school systems. When you can give a history lesson like Ras Kass does in this, no footnotes or citations are needed. It just has to be true, every gory little detail. Also, I did not know that Julius Caesar was considered "every woman's husband and every man's wife."
#9: "Smoke And Wine (slowed & warped version)" by Hank Williams III - The second experimental CD of Hank the 3rd's Straight to Hell was thrown together as a bonus and not really endorsed by his stupid record label at all. I find this odd, because I wish there was a genre of music like this, not a lumped together bonus CD that they didn't even break the tracks up on. It's truly amazing (and a testament to the ridiculous consumerism of America) that the record industry could make as much money as it did over the decades being as clueless and out of touch as it is. Then again, the current model of "repeat on free radio until sheeple think it's great" - although faltering - still seems to hold sway. Dr. Pavlov was right.
#10: "Willin'" by Little Feat - This is my favorite all-time Little Feat song of forever, and I can often be heard singing it loudly like a stupid hillbilly while carrying 5-gallon buckets of dumpster doven vegetables out to my big fat pigs almost ready for slaughter as soon as they eat enough whole corn to sweeten theyselves up just so. "I've been warped by the rain, driven by the snow, I'm drunk and dirty, but don't you know... I'm still."
#11: "Napoleon" by Ani DiFranco - Every month another stupid Ani DiFranco song makes the list and I think I will purge my gaypod of all signs of Ani, but then I have the tracks all on the home computer screen in front of me, and I like them all in one way or another and don't delete them. She has sunk her creepy little alternative lesbo greyhound riding power acoustic guitar playing tentacles deep into my cerebellum.
#12: "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" by Metallica - The only good Metallica is the old Metallica. I saw them live last fall and had backstage chillouts and all that, and it certainly seemed to me that Lars Ulrich is as big a dumbass as you would expect. Why the fuck is a drummer jumping up and running to the edge of the stage between songs and shit? Sit there and beat on things, soccerfag. Also of note is they clear the backstage halls of everybody - opening bands, roadies, guests, everybody - so that they don't have to make eye contact with anyone as they enter the arena from their dressing room, probably after some zen pilates and shit. Actually, we were chilling with our friends' band in their dressing room, and Kirk Hammett and that Robert Trujillo new bassists from Suicidal Tendencies dude poked their heads in and were completely chill, and actually you could see a longing in their eyes like they just wanted to chill out and drink beers and be cool, down-to-earth ass bitches. I only saw Hetfield and Ulrich onstage, and from that live experience combined with the background reports not to mention that Some Kind of Monster documentary, it is obvious they are the weakest links in the category of lounger. I would go so far to say as this band's history was probably a public battle for control of James Hetfield's soul by Lars Ulrich and the forces of sell-outtitude against Cliff Burton and the forces of hey dude let's do what we love to do and enjoy the rideness. Kirk Hammett seems like he just loves to play guitar so fuck all the other nonsense. Dave Mustaine, I would imagine, was kicked out because he very early on recognized Lars Ulrich's inherent soullessness. After Cliff Burton died, they put out a good album, a borderline one, and then a bunch of shit. The effects of Cliff Burton on Hetfield's soul have long been drained, and there is nothing there but Lars to fill that void now. It is sad.
#13: "Sacalo Sacalo" by Los Diablos Rojos - Another banging ass Peruvian track from The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias of Peru album. Much like Ani DiFranco, every month I think I will delete this stuff, but it's part of a large batch of my J.J. Krupert trackography that is no longer on my computer because an external hard drive got suicided by the government one night while I slept upstairs, so I'd have to steal it all again, which is a hassle and a half. So I never delete this stuff, because honestly, it's fun shit, like music is s'posed to be.
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